About

OUseful.info is a blog in part about… things that I think may be useful in an higher education context, one day…

For more info on how I manage my online presence, see How OUseful.info operates.

OUseful.inof started pointing here in July 2008. Posts from the OUseful.info blog prior to that (that used to be hosted at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59) are all archived at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive; all links to the old blog should redirect there…

Bio

Tony Hirst is:

• Lecturer in the Computing and Communication department at The Open University (0.8FTE),
• occasional open data trainer with the Open Knowledge Foundation School of Data,
• regular blogger at OUseful.info

With a background in electronics and artificial intelligence, he has authored on OU courses ranging from robotics to information skills, computer game design and appreciation and most recently data analysis and data management. He is passionate about open and lifelong education, and is actively involved in developing course models to support informal as well as formal education. As an open data advocate and self-proclaimed mashup artist, he gives regular workshop and conference presentations on how to create novel information services and find stories in data using freely available web tools and applications. (Workshop sessions available on: basic data wrangling skills; network visualisation with Gephi; simple data scraping; data cleaning with OpenRefine; writing charts with ggplot and RCharts.)

An Arcadia Fellow at the University Library, Cambridge in 2009, he spent many years berating academic libraries about the changing world of information around them.

Since posting a widely circulated map based visualisation of MPs’ travel expenses in Spring 2009, he has become increasingly interested in the practice of data journalism and the use of visualisation techniques as a way of making sense of complex data sets. His current focus of interest is on the development of robust, reliable and effective data related workflows for non-expert journalists and NGOs.

He co-founded getTheData.org, an open public data question and answer site and the public document consultation platform WriteToReply, which helped government departments and policy makers think differently about the nature of commentable documents as operational contributions to discussion and policy development in both those areas.